Centre for Parallel Computing

Activities in the Centre are based around large-scale distributed computing infrastructures (DCIs) such as grids and clouds, science gateways, computational workflow and infrastructure interoperability.

Science gateways offer seamless access to DCIs, shielding users from complex technical details and offering reliable and efficient services. Our work on science gateways aims at bridging the knowledge and skills gap that slows down or even prevents DCI users from exploiting these infrastructures for computationally demanding and data hungry applications by providing graphical workflow-oriented development environments to both describe and orchestrate the execution of distributed applications and massively heterogeneous DCIs. Together with collaborating partners CPC has helped develop a gateway framework called P-GRADE that comprises a toolset and customisation methodology to support end users to run their applications on DCIs in a seamless manner. P-GRADE is used by thousands of users within major user communities such as biosciences, astrophysics, computational chemistry, heliophysics, hydrometeorology, animations, rendering and seismology. For example, CPC works with the biosciences community to implement powerful tools for modelling protein molecule docking which helps minimising lengthy laboratory in vitro experimentations with very fast and much cheaper in silico simulations.

CPC collaborates with a large number of partner institutions representing a mixture of research centres and the end users of its developed technologies, including Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam (NL), Brunel University (UK), Cardiff University (UK), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (F), CloudBroker GmbH (CH), Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (G), ETH Zurich (CH), Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (I), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (G), Middle East Technical University (TR), MTA-SZTAKI (H), Stichting European Grid Initiative (NL), Trinity College Dublin (IRE), University College London (UK), University of Copenhagen (DK), and University of Zaragoza (S).

CPC research has been supported by major EU and Research Council grants.